


Tell Me About My Mom

by Heather



Series: A Better Lie [1]
Category: Angel: the Series
Genre: Alternate Universe, Flashback, Gen, Kid Fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-01-07
Updated: 2007-01-07
Packaged: 2017-10-08 02:54:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,041
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/71954
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Heather/pseuds/Heather





	Tell Me About My Mom

\--  
The Bronx, New York 1990  
\--

"Daddy?" Asks a little boy voice from the large expanse of Angel's bed. Connor has his own small bed in his own small room, but he is only five and still finds himself afraid to sleep alone most nights. Angel is never bothered. He has only recently stopped being paranoid of letting Connor out of his sight for more than a minute, and he will probably never get fully accustomed to sleeping alone himself. It's nice to have the excuse of being needed.

"What's up, kiddo?" He asks, turning on his side.

"Can you tell me again about my mom when I was born?" Wide blue eyes full of innocence. Angel has a hard time saying "no" to them.

"Tonight?" He asks.

"Yeah. Please?"

"It's kind of late…" The blue eyes get wider. Angel feels it as what resistance he had to begin with fades away. He chuckles a little. "All right."

Connor smiles broadly, pleased, then scoots closer to Angel under the blankets, curling up in his father's arms before looking up at him intently. Angel begins. "It was the first time we'd seen each other in almost a hundred years. We were both really sad when we said goodbye that first time, and it was really hard when I saw her not to walk away. I couldn't do it. Especially because she looked so lonely, you know?"

"Because she wasn't talking to you or her Master and Spike and Dru had gone away?" Connor asks.

"Who's telling this story?"

"Sorry, Dad."

Angel gently kisses his son's forehead. Tries to, anyway; ends up with a mouthful of little boy hair for his trouble. He smiles and begins again. "I walked up to her. She was really mad at me at first. Because I'd left her, and it made her sad. And maybe she was a little scared of me, too—"

"Because of your soul?"

"—because of my soul. But after a while, things started to be a little okay. She took me back to her house and let me stay with her for three whole days."

Connor makes a face. "And you guys did kissing and stuff."

"Hush, you." He tickles Connor's side a little and revels in the piping shriek of laughter and the squirmy struggle for a minute, then becomes serious again. Sadly, recovering his train of thought for this part isn't so easy. Summarizing it never is. "…yeah, okay, we did kissing and stuff."

"Gross!"

"Yeah, yeah. Anyway. The thing was, after the kissing and stuff, we kind of got into a fight." A watered-down version of a sticky moral quandary arising from three days of physical bliss that was never intended to be more than that; not for him. Darla was hard to resist, even at his strongest, but golden-paved futures with her would not happen, and could not happen. He wishes sometimes he had remembered that afterwards. "I had to leave again. I went back to the streets and thought I maybe had screwed up bad enough this time and I would never see her again."

"But you did." Connor enthuses. He knows the whole story by heart.

"I did. Almost a year later. It took her a long time to try and find me. She wasn't sure she wanted to tell me the truth about herself…the truth about you."

It's not really a lie. Darla had known Angel well enough to know that, in his present condition, he would have begged her not to get rid of the burden she carried. Turning to him had been the desperate act of someone who had no other choice.

"I was so stunned when she came to my house—" His underground rat-infested lair— "all big and tired, carrying you. I didn't know what it meant. Nobody knew what it meant. She tried so hard to find somebody who could tell her what was happening to her and nobody could. It was just a miracle. Our miracle." Or their death knell, depending on which mystical expert you asked, but Angel has carefully culled that part of the story for five-year-old ears.

"She decided that we could stay together again. We got this apartment, and started getting ready for you." Connor is paying rapt attention now. They've gotten to the point in the story when childish interruptions usually cease. "You were born right here in this bed, on a cold, rainy night a couple weeks before Christmas." Not actually on Christmas, the day on which saviors are named. Angel remembers Darla's relief.

"We'd spent a long time getting ready, and I still don't think we were. What did we know about having a baby?" Angel chuckles weakly to himself and his memories of his own new fatherhood naïveté. "We spent two months just getting to know you, and how to take care of you. We stayed inside almost all the time, just watching you _be._" To Angel's eternal thankfulness, that part is completely true. He sighs. "The thing was, though, that your mom and I still weren't right for each other. We still had…things…that got in the way." Dead things, mostly. Old things; sacred things. Things he tries to forget. "She wanted to go away again. To not see me anymore. And she loved you, kiddo, she loved you with all her heart—" What heart she _had_— "but she couldn't bring herself to take you away from me."

Connor is nearly asleep now, his small thumb having found his small mouth and his blue eyes—so like his absent mother's—are half-closed.

"So she left…even though she loved us. Which is why she decided to let you stay with me forever." Lump in his throat. Angel hates it when that happens, when his eyes burn and his pain becomes a physical thing in his gullet and he has to swallow it so his son will not see his tears.

"She really loved us, Daddy?" Connor asks sleepily, his eyes completely closed now.

"Yeah, son. She did." Angel murmurs as he tucks the blankets around the small boy.

It's not a lie, but it's not completely true. Angel just can't bring himself to tell his young son that his mother was afraid of him, too.


End file.
